woahfraze

There aren’t that many ways to screw Day 2 up. That’d be them making an obvious reach, or selecting at one of the few positions that we are pretty solid at. Because as excited as we are for the growth and improvement this team is showing, it’s still not an overly talented or deep roster. Honestly, there aren’t really many positions I’d feel bad about. Feelings about Bryce aside (because we are not going to select a QB), it’s really RB (bad positional value) and that’s it. I guess OT too since we grabbed Freeling in Round 1. While not as high on my wish list as other spots, you can justify WR or TE. Interior offensive lineman who would likely take over an interior spot either this year (at center) or guard (next for cap casualty of Hunt or Lewis)? Fine by me. Dlineman? Yes, that’s a highly rotational position and we have zero quality depth. ILB? Yep, could stand for an upgrade over Wallace. EDGE? Absolutely wouldn’t hate another option to spell Phillips, Scourton, and Princely. FS? Would love to add better coverage skill set to the backend of the defense. Moehrig and Ransom are great in run support but not as good deep. Adding a more traditional FS would allow us to mix and match/run some 3 safety sub packages and or a big nickel type look with a SS down near the line for better run support in possible pass downs. CB? Could stand to get better at nickel.

Absolutely not. That’s too much for replacement level player. Bryce may be that. Or he may turn into something more. If you can’t see the flashes, you’re willfully blind. There’s more bad than good right now, but there’s less bad than there was earlier in his career. He’s only 24 and he’s showing signs of improvement. He may never become consistent enough to justify a long term contract, but he’s shown enough to roll the dice on what effectively will turn into a 2 year, $30MM contract for the next two years to see if he can earn something longer. Sure, in his one season starting, Howell managed to throw for 3,946 yards and toss 21 TDs, but it took throwing the ball an astounding 612 times. He also threw 21 INTs (for a particularly egregious 3.4 INT%). For all the talk of him being a deep ball thrower, he still only averaged 6.4 YPA, with an average air yards of 5.6 yards per attempt. And for all the excuses of Washington’s line giving him no protection (65 sacks taken that year), he was only pressured on 22.7% of his dropbacks, which is a few percentage points lower than what Bryce has had to deal with each year (24.2, 26.7, and 24.0%). These are all numbers that are at best roughly equivalent to Bryce’s production the past two years. It’s wild to me people can claim so confidently that he’s a better QB.

This is a partially bad take. Willis is the only guy mentioned here that can reasonably be expected to perform at a level higher than Bryce. Winston and Minshew is washed, and Howell was not good in Washington as a starter and didn’t field a single snap this past year. I swear the only reason people are obsessed over him is that he went to UNC. You’re not going to have better success, or even potential for success with those guys as your QB as you would with Bryce. Now, if you want to argue this thing from a production per dollars perspective, that it’d be better to roll with one of them instead because we could allocate the savings elsewhere on the roster, that’d be a better argument IMO. I’d disagree with it; relying on a QB making less they $5MM/year that isn’t on a rookie contract is not a winning strategy. But I could see the argument that it’s possibly a viable alternative to Bryce on a $25MM/year contract. But no, none of those QBs are better than Bryce.

There’s been online/fan talk of moving Moton to LT for years. I’m sure those conversations were also had internally and it never happened. So that’s not a realistic path forward.

Nijman wasn’t terrible. But I wouldn’t describe his play as good either. I think he’s still best suited as a swing tackle off the bench. And unfortunately Brady Christiansen cannot be relied on given h injuries as well We should resign Nijman, but we need to bring in someone else either in free agency or the draft to give us an alternative in the event he doesn’t perform. Free agent options are pretty bad unless there are some surprise cuts, so the draft is probably our better option. With our overall needs, would be nice to shore up the defense in Round 1, but if the value that’s there is in a LT, I think you have to seriously consider that. If Ickey returns and can still be effective, I think you can move him or the new LT over to RT since Moton will likely be retiring in the next couple years.

Absolutely the 49ers. They of course are a good team, and it’s incredible what they’ve done through all the injuries they’ve had. And Kyle Shanahan is a great coach and offensive mastermind. But I want no part of the Rams and Sean McVay. They and he are basically a better version of the 49ers and Shanahan. Also, it’s very hard to beat a team twice in one year. I don’t think we could do that to the Rams. Am I confident we could beat the 49ers? No. But they didn’t blow us out of the water with better talent or impose their will on us when we played in Week 12. We came out with a bad game plan and executed poorly. That game was winnable. I think the 49ers will be better prepared, but I feel more comfortable matching up with them than the Rams.

He was fighting a jam 2 yards from the line of scrimmage. Absolutely not OPI.

I think if you look at Cam Newton’s rushing totals, there is an argument he should be in the HOF. I wrote a post many years ago comparing his TD total to those of great RBs of yesteryear’s past. Unfortunately I cannot find that post, and I don’t recall the specifics, but the takeaway was that players above a certain total rushing TD were all in the HOF. And those players were all RBs that I was comparing Cam to. At the time, Cam may not quite have been there yet, but if you projected forward, he was on pace to easily clear the hurdle. I have no idea if he ended up doing that since his career was cut short. That being said, even if he did make it to whatever that threshold was, I think he was too polarizing a player, with too short a peak, for voters to put him in the HOF.

Ickey barely shoved him. Shouldn’t have been a flag. But it was even more egregious than that. The flag csme out before Ickey shoved. Ref was reaching for it right as Ickey was grabbing Jordan’s jersey near the chest plate before there really was any forceful contact. Laughable it was thrown and laughable they didn’t pick that up after it was.

Part of the success in the 2nd half was that the offense kept the ball for 13:10 of the 3rd quarter. Credit to the defense for forcing a 3 and out on the Rams’ only possession of that quarter, but when the other team only has the ball for 1:50 of a quarter, of course the points scored for the half is going to be limited. But yes, further credit to the defense for in the 4th quarter, standing up and forcing their 2nd turnover in the red zone to prevent the Rams from taking the lead after having gotten gashed both through the air and on the ground on the prior possession.

You absolutely can start someone over him with the level of performance he’s shown over a large sample size. Doesn’t matter what his pedigree is. I think the locker room really does like him, but they like winning more. If there’s another QB on the roster that can beat him out for starter, it won’t be a problem. The issue is, as bad as he’s been, I’m not sure there is a QB that can so definitely beat him out in that fashion. A rookie is going to struggle because the 2026 class is pretty poor and just in general, the transition to pro QB is more difficult now than it has been in the past because the college game doesn’t require QBs to play under center or attack the areas of the field a pro style offense does. And the retreads are always a gamble. For every Darnold or Daniel Jones that finally puts it together after 5-6 years, there’s a dozen other busts who can’t.

As a general optimist who tries to be even handed, I was in the “I have hope” but it’s now gone category. I acknowledged that the bad games were more frequent than the OK ones which were in turn more frequent than the good ones. I just held out hope that he could put things together and more consistently perform at those mid and higher levels. But I’m off that train now. I think he can probably improve his consistency a bit from where he is, but it’ll never be good enough. He’s on the roster next year because he’s under contract, but I don’t think we should pick up his 5th year option and definitely not extend him. He may start next year too because there genuinely are not as many competent QBs as there are starting spots in the league, so the alternatives are all trash. But we’ve got to get fresh blood in the QB room and find our next starter.

Bryce is…a problem. And plenty of other blame to go around execution wise (Tet drops, offensive line holds or sacks given up to derail drives, XL stepping out of bounds to negate a catch). But WTF is Dave Canales doing? 13 carries at 5.3 yards a pop in a game that wasn’t totally out of hand. And lining up in shotgun and passing from the 1 on that 2 pt conversion? Maybe Bryce and the passing game could be a bit more effective in we leaned into that running game.

Oh absolutely. If we choose the extend him, it has to be for something more in the $15-$25MM range, and that’s assuming he demonstrates more consistent play. It’d be for compensation greater than the true journeymen of the league but less than the upper half of starters. His current play doesn’t support anything remotely close to what other QBs have gotten on the first extension. I believe the 5th year option would be for a bit more than this range, but that’d maybe be OK since it’d only be a one year commitment. What’s key is that the franchise doesn’t financially strap themselves by overpaying for their QB play. Honestly, if Bryce can be a ln average QB who is clutch on occasion, paying less money for that level of performance and having more resources to build the rest of the roster may not be a terrible place to be. Sort of a “lite” version of the benefit from having your starter on a rookie QB contract.

100% on the same page on context, and whether trading up made sense, and if your were going to, should it have been Bryce. I was a CJ guy heading into the draft, but I didn’t hate the Bryce pick at the time. But we have to make decisions for moving forward based on that context. The trade up and what we have up, regrettable as it is given that context, is a sunk cost. We have to decide whether the chance Bryce can develop further into a functional QB is greater or less than the chance you can find a retread or drafted QB that will perform better than him. I don’t know the answer to that question. It sounds like you do have an answer in mind, and it’s that the chance of Bryce being better than the alternative isn’t likely. Gun to my head, I’d say I probably agree with that take. But I’m not confident in it.